This
year’s entry in the Best
American Science Fiction and Fantasy
series contains (as did last year’s) an impressive and
intriguing array of twenty authors: Sofia Samatar, Kelly Link, Adam
Johnson, Catherynne M. Valente, Kij Johnson, S. L. Huang, Liz
Ziemska, Dexter Palmer, Rachel Swirsky, Julian Mortimer Smith, Salman
Rushdie, Nick Wolven, Maria Dahvana Headley, Dale Bailey, Will
Kaufman, Charlie Jane Anders, Sam J. Miller, Seth Dickinson, Vandana
Singh and Ted Chiang. I think calling this roster impressive requires
little explanation. These are some of the most talented, versatile
and imaginative practitioners of sf/f/h today. But I say
“intriguing,” because some of these writers, like Dexter
Palmer (whose novel Version Control
I recently reviewed in this space) are not normally associated with
the short form, and also because in some cases (e.g. Julian Mortimer
Smith) they were simply new to me,
and I was excited to make their literary acquaintance. Isn’t
that one of the most thrilling aspects of anthologies, the joyous
discovery of gifted storytellers of every ilk and inclination?

My
overall impression of this selection of stories is very favorable.
There are five that blew me away, and I would unhesitatingly count
these as not only among the best of the year, but also as some of
these writers’ best efforts. Catherynne M. Valente has, with
the chilling “Planet Lion,” perhaps created the ultimate
future colonization story, which is an accomplishment indeed in a
field that hasn’t shied away from genocidal considerations,
going back to Robert Silverberg’s “Sundance” and
Nancy Kress’s more recent follow-up “Eaters,” and
others. Like “Sundance,” “Planet Lion”’s
multi-point-of-view depiction of events taking a terrible turn on an
alien planet is told in alternating styles that reveal a writer at
the peak of her powers. The human logs are equal parts scientific
jargon and quotidian banter, while the description of the horrific
effects of humans’ actions on the planet’s lion-like
beings is conveyed through aggressively experimental, metronomically
hammering prose, as for example:

One
lion hunts alone in the steelveldt Vergulde Draeck. As well she hunts
with every other lion in the watering hole. She hunts with one lion
called Thulium. She hunts with one lion called Bromide. She hunts
with one lion called Manganese. She hunts with one lion called Nickel
who sired her and one lion called Niobium who bore her and one lion
called Uranium who carried one lion called Yttrium in her pouch until
she could devour the smallgod and enlist with the pride. In the
watering hole every lion swims with every other lion. Every lion
swallows the heart of every other lion. Every lion hunts in the den
of every other lion’s brain. Two hundred thousand lions hunt in
the steelveldt Vergulde Draeck with one lion called Yttrium. Ten
million hunt in the watering hole. The watering hole has enough water
for everyone.

Liz
Ziemska impressed me greatly with her finely constructed narrative of
a woman becoming “The Mushroom Queen,” a dazzling
combination of precise, scientifically-informed imagery and surreal
metaphysics. (“Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies, the
reproductive organs, of mycelium. They feed on rotting things, like
rabbit poo, and troubled relationships.”) I’ll be on the
lookout for Ziemska’s work going forward.

Maria
Dahvana Headley’s brutal, unrelenting “The Thirteen
Mercies” tells of engineered soldiers, trained in the dark arts
of “reversed” mercies, living out their final days in a
hellish prison of jungle and rain. Headley has established herself as
capable of effortless pyrotechnics and inventive fecundity in her
stories of recent years. Her gift for mythology-imbued fantasy is
here delivered in an existentially hefty, grueling prose missile, one
that blasts off with the premise, “There’s never been a
world that isn’t a world at war. That’s the truest thing
we know,” and follows it through to its most cacophonous
detonation.

In
“Things You Can Buy for a Penny,” Will Kaufman takes one
of fantasy’s oldest tropes—be careful what you wish for,
particularly when supernatural entities are involved—and weaves
it into an exquisitely sly and eerie spell of temptation and tragedy.

Charlie
Jane Anders is in fine form indeed with “Rat Cather’s
Yellow,” a touching examination of the realities of dementia as
made concrete through the fantasies of its sufferers.

Other
stories that moved me include Adam Johnson’s “Interesting
Facts,” a thoughtful examination of what it means to be present
in one’s life; S. L. Huang’s “By Degrees and
Dilatory Time,” a probing vision of adaptation to sensory
rewiring; Julian Mortimer Smith’s “Headshot,” a
sharp investigation of democracy and warfare as lensed through social
media; Sam J. Miller’s harrowing alternate Stonewall Uprising,
“The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History;” and the
impossible post-human choices faced by Seth Dickinson’s “Three
Bodies at Mitanni.” There’s a lot of other solid work
here: Salman Rushdie’s historically-informed narrative sails
along with prose as elegant as we’ve come to expect, Kelly
Link’s strange vampire odyssey is thought-provoking and
unexpected in the ways she excels, and so on.

As
you’ve probably gathered from this review, this anthology skews
towards the literary, the unconventional, towards oblique
storytelling and experiments in form, and not all of them will
resonate or even satisfy every reader. Some of these stories, like
Rachel Swisky’s profligately nutty “Tea Time,”
really demand quite a bit—but they deliver generously, in turn.
No doubt this is a reflection of Karen Joy Fowler’s aesthetic
sensibility: Her own stories are replete with misdirections and
delicate ambivalences, and her emphasis on challenging, provocative
material for this compilation isn’t surprising in that light.
Fowler once wrote that she had “no compunction regarding my
contract with the reader, to use a phrase I hear often in writing
groups.” For many of these startling and delirious tales, it
will be up to you, Curious Reader, to draw up your own contract.

Title: What the #@&% Is That?: The Saga Anthology of the Monstrous and the MacabreEditors: John Joseph Adams & Douglas CohenPublisher: Saga Press

These
twenty stories, perfectly described by the book’s subtitle,
form one of my favorite original anthologies in some time. The
irresistible linking conceit is simply that each story contains a
variation of the line, “What the #@&% is that,” the
appearance of which readers will probably try to spot, sportsmanlike,
in the way of Hitchcock cameos. The contributing authors, many of
them masters of the twisted and tenebrous, are Laird Barron, Amanda
Downum, Scott Sigler, Simon R. Green, Desirina Boskovich, Isabel Yap,
Maria Dahvana Headley, Christopher Golden, John Langan, D. Thomas
Minton, Seanan McGuire, Grady Hendrix, Jonathan Maberry, Gemma Files,
Nancy Holder, Adam-Troy Castro, Terence Taylor, Tim Pratt, An
Owomoyela and Rachel Swirsky, and Alan Dean Foster.

If
you derive any sort of pleasure from the grotesque, the fanciful, the
freakish and unnatural, buy this book and, better still, gift it to
an innocent friend along with the gentle promise of some fun,
haunting yarns. The friendship may not survive, but you’ll
still feel pride in your dark deed of dissemination.

I
have six top picks and two close runners-up, with my response to the
rest of the stories ranging from enthusiasm to an acknowledgement of
technical professionalism.

Laird
Barron’s “Mobility” is the perfect anthology
opener. It is an explosion. “Life is hard in forty million B.C.
beneath the apple-green heavens,” we are told, and a few
paragraphs later Bryan is ordering baked tuna “at the grill
where Lovecraft had eaten whenever Weird Tales
sent a check, which was sufficiently infrequent to qualify as a
special occasion,” and we know we’re off to a special
occasion of our own. Any kind of plot synopsis would defy coherence.
What we have here is an uncanny, utterly mind-stretching blend of
cosmic terror, Grand Guignol and bio-body-horror. Which is another
way of saying it’s a story the effect of which is best
experienced, not described, and about which we might reasonably and
affectionately think, “What the #@&% was that?”
Also, Barron gets a prize for his use of “In for a penny.”

Amanda
Downum’s “Fossil Heart,” in which regret and
monsters fuel the actual rewinding of time, is a very strong
follow-up, distressing and stylishly nightmarish. Ever wonder how
angels, a cult leader, and pterodactyls might be related? Maria
Dahvana Headley is here to clear things up with her wildly offbeat
story “Little Widow.” Even the story’s most quiet
passages contain pathos and satire in abundance: “We knew
better than to stay Sister. When everyone died, we chose emergency
new names. We looked at a magazine of celebrities and picked by dress
color. I chose Natalie, and the other two Sisters, who were both
sixteen, chose Reese and Scarlett. Then Reese took out a pair of
scissors, cut off my hair, and hacked my dress up from the ground to
my knees. She snipped her own hair so short, she could pass for a
boy. Scarlett tore her hem into a miniskirt, and chopped her hair
into a bob. We were all crying but we looked better.”

John
Langan’s “What Is Lost, What Is Given Away,” which
begins with a high school reunion and ends up somewhere far more
terrifying, focuses as much on the ravages of time and the
disillusions of adulthood as it does the bizarre,
mathematically-generated predicament of Joel Martin, the character in
whom the protagonist takes an interest. Langan’s long
sentences, the careful diction and enveloping tone of his
storytelling, are a welcome contrast to some of the anthology’s
more rending, staccato narratives. Parts of the conversation in which
the narrator probes the plausibility of Martin’s claims with
innocently logical questions, and Martin’s furious responses,
are also positively funny.

A
story that truly managed to get under my skin, to adrenalize me with
fear and deliver a galvanic surge of angst and otherworldly jitters,
was Gemma Files’s “Ghost Pressure.” Mister
Zukauskas, during hospice, begins to concern Jaiden, one of the
“end-of-life doulas” caring for him, with his
folklore-rooted claims that his wife, to whom he’s been married
over sixty years, is not really a person but “this thing,
called a Slogutė or a Naktinėja
. . . that, like, comes through the keyhole and oppresses people
while they’re sleeping.” Files’s ability to be so
hair-raising in comparably few pages is admirable.

An
Owomoyela and Rachel Swirsky offer a brilliantly
claustrophobic and unflinching look at misogyny and the schisms of
identity appropriation in the multi-layered “Whose Drowned Face
Sleeps”: “I’m not her and she isn’t me. When
I say ‘I,’ I might mean either one of us, but that’s
not precise. I have no past, so I took her memories. I have no name,
so I took her name. I had no body, but I have hers now, and she’s
the one languishing in a puddle, snarling, hungry, and hating.”

Two
more standouts. In Desirina Boskovich’s expertly modulated
“Down in the Deep and the Dark,” a family gathering for a
wedding gradually and unnervingly pivots into Shining-esque
nefariousness—and beyond. In addition to its other virtues,
Boskovich’s story takes the prize for best title-line riff,
though if you’re inclined to religious offense you may
disagree.

In
Grady Hendrix’s punch-in-the-gut “The House That Love
Built,” a man lives with two women who don’t appear to
see each other. I’ll note too that my favorite opening is that
of Adam-Troy Castro’s EC Comics-gory “Framing Mortensen”:
“Once I had become wealthy enough to buy miracles, I used one
to obtain the living head and shoulders of my longtime enemy, Philip
Mortensen.”

The
overriding spirit of this anthology, if there is one, might be summed
up with this line from Headley’s story: “All us three
were suffering badly from the pissed-offs.” The pissed-offs:
almost sounds like a literary movement, doesn’t it? But not
everything in this anthology is raucous or angry. There’s also
soul-searching, tenderness and a very serious preoccupation—even
when apparently distorted by fiction’s most extreme funhouse
mirrors—with the quiet horrors of the real world.